


Hell Hath No Fury

by Foxwine



Series: Back to the Fold [4]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Gen, Mercy has anger issues, Unreliable Narrator, a little swearing, black ops McCree, reference after reference to the Swiss Base explosion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-07
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-18 14:13:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28619343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Foxwine/pseuds/Foxwine
Summary: Angela knows that it's dangerous for someone living in hiding as she is to be too predictable. And yet, every year, she goes anyway.It hasn't been a problem yet.
Relationships: Jesse McCree & Angela "Mercy" Ziegler
Series: Back to the Fold [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1180190
Kudos: 6





	Hell Hath No Fury

**Author's Note:**

> All of the stories in the Back to the Fold series can be read on their own, however, they all exist on the same timeline. The series is not in chronological order, because it's in my recommended reading order.  
> This story is set a few months before Ghosts on Bitter Ground.
> 
> I and my writing are forever indebted to my beloved partner Demolition, who knows and delivers the exact balance of listening, support, and criticism that I need.

**Hell Hath No Fury**

It grew easier every year, she reflected, to descend the short flight of stairs onto the wide, flat flagstone plain of the memorial and begin the walk to the centre of it where the stone slabs listing all the names of the fallen — except one — stood in a solemn, silent ring around an eternal flame.

Of course, every time was easier than the first one that Mercy had come to this place for its fallen and it’s dead rather than for its living, nine years ago.

There had still been fires underground then, and she had choked on smoke as she spread the wings of the Mk Four Valkyrie Suit — Mk Five, the version meant to give her the power of full flight when she wanted it rather than the weak almost hover of the Mk Four, still in development then, was never to be completed — to lighten her steps and prevent the rubble from shifting treacherously beneath her feet as she searched frantically for signs of life, refreshing her halo visor so many times it threatened to overheat, her grip on her caduseus staff so tight that when the time came to try to put it down hours later she had to peel her cramped hand from its grip a finger at a time with the other hand. She had already been twenty hours too late by then, though she had not known that yet at the time.

That first time, sliding and searching through the wreckage, Angela had still hoped as she searched through the remains of Overwatch’s death throes. Had still thought that if she just refreshed her visor one more time, one more, one more, she would find the heartbeat she sought, would see a heat signature in the shape of a person and not the abstract dance of the fires.

Angela arrived at the standing circle of stones, and stared sightlessly at them, her hands tightening around the stems of the flowers she held. The bite of the metal chain wrapped around and between the fingers of her left hand as she clenched her fist grounded her as she thought of the year the granite slabs had been unveiled, two years to the day after she had searched through the devastation.

She couldn’t remember, didn’t know, how many times she had circled the great grey stones, scanning the listed names before the lack, the horrible betrayal of that one, deliberate absence had dropped her to her knees. That had been the only year that she knew of that any of the others who had remained had come on the anniversary day. She remembered Winston’s enormous, warm hand resting across her shuddering shoulders, and Torbjörn’s silencing hand gesture at Lena as the young woman, her eyes wide and panicked, had started to babble something. One of them might have said something to her. She didn’t know. She had been far too lost, thinking that she should cry even as no tears came. No tears ever came, of course, but they should have.

She had scanned the crowd behind the reporters that day as the tarps covering the stones had fallen behind her, searching in vain for a flash of silver, a flicker of red, or a hat-brim pulled low so that no one could see where the wearer was looking. Those absences as much as the one on the stones had made her fall to the flagstones that day. One by one the supports she had grown used to had been cut away, leaving nothing but the memory of where they had been. Too much to keep standing, not enough left to hold her up, that day.

It had only been what was left of the members of Overwatch at the unveiling ceremony. The families of the many fallen had not been invited, had not even had a representative on the stage. A display of those who were being held answerable, not of those being honoured.

Even seven years later, the memory of having to go back to testify at the UN hearings after the fresh revelation of just how cruel and callous they would be to suit their ends still filled her with enough anger that it was momentarily hard to breathe and she stilled, fighting it back under control.

She heard footsteps behind her, a slow easy pace. Someone who didn’t mind being heard was walking toward the ring of stones where she stood. She chose to keep looking at the stone before her rather than turning to see. She was not the only one who visited this memorial on this day, even if there were fewer and fewer others with each passing year as people chose to forget. She appreciated the clear footsteps of the other visitor though, audible long before they got close enough to notice otherwise. She didn’t react well to being surprised, especially from behind.

“I thought I’d find you here today, Angie.”

The drawling accent and the nickname together were familiar, even if the baritone voice that said them was rougher than the one in her memory.

“Am I so predictable?” she asked without turning around.

“For this y’are,” he answered easily, and in her mind a young man with coppery brown hair falling into his eyes and a carefully kept beard rocked on the heels of his boots and hooked his thumbs into his thick belt as he spoke. “A’least to me, anyways.” His shrug was practically audible in his voice.

Nine years were not so very long after all, she reflected, not when she so easily understood the message hidden in his simple words.

More people than just the man who stood behind her were interested in finding the reclusive Doctor Ziegler. However, he was the only one among that number who had thought to come and look for her here, at the memorial built over the ruins of Overwatch’s Swiss base on the ninth anniversary of the day that it had been levelled in an explosive blast.

“Is that so?” she asked affectionately, and turned around to see him. Knowing it was likely to happen, she acted as if she didn’t notice as his eyes momentarily widened as he looked at her face, which was easy since the expression vanished so swiftly it could be counted as barely more than a flinch.

A delighted smile spread across her face as she looked him over. “Why, Jesse, did you dress up for seeing me?”

Jesse McCree gave her a wry look, but then smiled. “Seemed appropriate for where an’ when we were meetin’,” he drawled, hooking his thumbs in his jacket pockets.

McCree was wearing a charcoal grey suit and a tie in a shade of blue that brought too many memories to the front of her mind, a suit with a well tailored fit that showed off his tall, broad-shouldered frame and without any telltale bulges from the weapons there was absolutely no question in her mind that he was carrying to ruin its lines.

Despite his body having thickened in the many years since the last time she had seen him, his neatly trimmed beard being far more substantial than she had ever seen it before, or his commonly unruly hair being swept back from his face and tamed into order as well as being slightly shot with the occasional grey hair, there was no mistaking who she was looking at.

“No hat?” she asked with a slight smile playing at her lips and a tilt of her head to the side, offering her cheek, just slightly.

His hand went up as if to finger the brim of the missing headgear before it dropped back to his side. “Didn’t want to stand out too much,” he explained regretfully, and made no other move.

The cowboy hat he should have been wearing would certainly have ruined the look of a lawyer who had just made partner in his firm that McCree was currently sporting. If young lawyers in Switzerland tended to wear broken-in boots rather than highly polished wingtips, or took strolls out to a memorial dedicated to a long-defunct military organization without an overcoat but wearing dark leather gloves to hide that one of their hands was articulated metal instead of flesh and blood. Still, it would pass from a distance, or for the unobservant, if anyone was paying attention at all.

“You clean up well,” Angela told him, as if the last time she had laid eyes on him had been only a few weeks ago, and not almost nine years in the past. She wondered if he knew that she had seen him hovering in the group of onlookers at the outskirts of Morrison’s grand military funeral all those years ago in ill-fitting black clothes that probably weren’t his and a baseball hat that definitely wasn’t, his newly scruffy beard doing nothing to disguise the sharp line of his chin. She had wanted to ask why he would have taken such a risk for the funeral of a man he had hardly associated with, but there hadn’t been a chance.

McCree’s smile spread wider at her words, deepening the crow’s feet that had developed at the corners of his eyes. “Lookin’ mighty fine yourself, Angie,” he replied easily. “Remarkable fine.”

Subtle without being subtle at all, she thought fondly. Apparently, McCree had decided not to ask her outright why she still looked exactly the same as the last time he had seen her a decade ago, or why despite her being so many years his senior by decades he had become the more aged-looking between the two of them, the only one with wrinkles, even if they were only a few crow’s feet.

Which didn’t mean he wouldn’t make it clear to her that he had most definitely noticed.

“The miracles of modern medicine,” she deflected lightly, waving a hand.

McCree’s gaze dropped to the bunch of bright marigolds in her grip with the gesture, and his smile slipped.

“You bring those every year?” he asked.

Angela brushed the fingertips of her right hand over the petals of the French marigolds. They were not the right breed, not the brilliant, brassy orange they should have been, but they were marigolds all the same. “Yes, every year.”

“Even tho’ this isn’t-”

A flash of memory crossed her mind: a dark, red-black urn, so small, too small for what it was supposed to hold, cupped in old, withered hands, a woman’s soft, broken voice _“...my last, my sweetheart child, my only boy. Oh, my sweet boy...”_

“Where else would I bring them?” She cut off McCree’s words and the memory both with the question.

Without waiting for an answer, she entered the circle of memorial stones, and crouched to lay the marigolds next to the low plinth of the eternal flame. She stayed balanced there, looking into the flame and rolling the chain over her left hand with her right as McCree moved to stand at her back in the gap between two of the granite memorial slabs.

There was a long moment of silence between them, in which Angela thought of nothing but the feel of the chain as it slid over and under her fingers.

McCree waited to speak until she stood up again from her crouch.

“Reinhardt was absolutely certain you’d go to Arlington.”

The name was like an electric shock applied to the base of her skull, accompanied by a stab of pain she had thought was dulled to a mere ache years ago.

“Reinhardt?” she managed to gasp out, whirling to face McCree again, too surprised at hearing that name cross his lips to control how fast she did so.

McCree’s right hand twitched, a minute flex of his fingers, but he otherwise controlled any reaction to her abrupt change in position.

He slanted his chin in a faint nod in her direction. “Won myself a friendly bet by knowin’ you’d not willingly set foot there again.”

Angela narrowed her eyes at him, knowing that Jesse McCree would never have made a bet unless he knew he would win. “How much?” she did not ask so much as demand.

McCree smiled, a light of mischief in his eyes that she clearly remembered the look of. “Well now, if I told ya, you’d make me share,” he pointed out.

She sniffed in mock dismissiveness. “If you are making bets based on what my behaviour will be, it is only my right to share in the winnings. And to bet on such a thing with Reinhardt, really. You should be ashamed, Jesse, taking advantage of him so.”

Reinhardt had barely known her, she had been little more than a particularly active member of Overwatch’s research team to him and they had never really been friends, even after she had entered the role of field medic and had gone on a handful of missions with him. They had never progressed past being cordial colleagues. She wasn’t even certain if he had ever known her, or only an image of her that he had created.

The old Crusader would not have realized that she could not set foot in Arlington Cemetery again without hearing the echo of the words Reinhardt himself had said, too loudly, too soon, too callously at the side of Jack Morrison’s empty ceremonial grave. He would never have thought of how she would avoid the place thereafter, never wanting to hear those words again.

She shoved the memory away savagely before she could remember his voice or the look on his face as he had spoken.

“Wasn’t a bet with Reinhardt,” McCree informed her. “An’ I wasn’t the only one winning that one neither.”

The implications of those bare two sentences, of the resounding question of ‘but then who?’ they brought was almost too much to take in all at once. Angela raised a hand to rub at her temple. Her left hand. The pendants on the chain still wrapped around her fingers — two blackened, fire-warped, round-cornered rectangles of old steel — swung from her palm to tap her lightly on the cheek.

It was a day of entirely too many memories.

_“You should have them,”_ an old woman’s soft, sad voice whispered in her memory. _“I will not be... he would want you to take them.”_ Hands, large, wrinkled old hands, the knuckles swollen from arthritis folded her fingers over the damaged dog-tags. The familiar smell of a hospital, a soft, steady beeping from beside the bed. _“You are a good girl, to come see me so often. I wish...”_

She had not visited often enough, and never as soon as she should have.

“Angela?” McCree’s voice pulled her back to the present day.

She sighed and untangled the chain from around her fingers, dropping it over her head before tucking the tags back into their usual place inside her shirt before looking up into McCree’s face.

“There is a nice coffee shop not too far from here,” she said, “with a patio that practically no one uses this time of year.” She strode forward, reaching to grab his left elbow as she passed, forcing him to turn and walk with her or be yanked sideways from the strength she put into her grip. When he turned to walk beside her, she hooked her hand in his elbow as he bent his arm, turning the somewhat forced march into a more genteel, escorted walk together, soft wool under her hand, too organic for her liking given how long it had been since her previous meal. “We shall go there, order ourselves something warm to drink, and then you are going to tell me what the hell is going on.” She bit out the final six words with barely restrained fury in the tone of voice that she used to give orders to flustered nurses in the midst of battle surgery.

McCree jerked slightly under her hand at either the words or her tone, but remained blessedly silent.

The walk to the restaurant was quiet and McCree did not fight her lead, which Angela was thankful for. Her sudden spike in anger had surprised her, and she wasn’t certain why the soft concern in the way McCree had said her name after she had spaced out on him had caused her abrupt, white-hot burst of near-rage as she had spoken to him. Though she did know that it was at least partially because her mental state at that point had been entirely his fault. A great deal of her fresh anger could be explained by the indignation blooming within her at his daring to be worried about her reaction after he showed up out of the blue on the one day of the year when she let the past press so close to her present, dragging all of their shared spectres along with him and spreading them at her feet.

That wasn’t all of it though, and trying to pick it apart and understand it occupied her through the whole walk.

McCree was silent for his own reasons. She knew that if he had found the atmosphere too oppressive or the quiet too long he was more than capable of filling it with the sound of his own voice, but he did not. She suspected the reason had something to do with the way he tensed at her side as they left the Overwatch Swiss Memorial and re-entered the town, buildings rising up around them. Not that she would have noticed if she hadn’t been so close to his side, her hand carefully resting lightly on his forearm away from his elbow so that the fabric of his sleeve wouldn’t foul or catch in the artificial joint. To all outward appearances, he simply prowled, loose and predatory, at her side without concern.

But he had not kissed her cheek when she had offered it. So she doubted he was really as unconcerned as he seemed.

Some might have been worried or frightened, walking so close to someone with as powerful an aura of danger as McCree possessed, but Angela had long ago grown used to being in the presence of predators in human skin in all of their various levels of alertness. To be walking by the side of one again after so many years without was practically a comfort to her, a feeling that she found she had missed dearly.

Not enough of a comfort to entirely ease her anger at McCree, as it turned out, even if she remained irritatingly uncertain as to all of the exact reasons why.

When they reached the café, she released his arm, and glared him wordlessly into a seat on the outside patio with the solid wall of the building at his back. She remained standing long enough to catch the eye of a waitress inside, then sat down herself at the small round table, close to but not quite across from McCree, on his left side.

He opened his mouth to speak, but seeing that the waitress was heading toward them, she stopped him by narrowing her eyes at him with a carefully chosen, imitated expression that she hoped gave him a flashback to the past as jarring as the ones that he had been giving her at the memorial had been. His mouth snapped shut with a gratifying click of his teeth.

Old habits died hard after all, it seemed.

Angela ordered for both of them in brisk German, and they sat in silence together as the waitress left and they waited for her to return with their drinks.

McCree spent the time picking at the glove covering his mechanical left hand, pulling at the leather where it passed over the various joints. Angela simply sat, trying not to think in order to control her anger. Despite the crispness of the air that kept the other patrons of the restaurant off the patio so that the two of them had it to themselves for the time being it was a lovely day, and she lifted her face to feel the slight breeze, imagining it blowing her rage away like dust.

The waitress returned, and set a large mug of beige liquid in front of McCree. Then she set down a small tray for Angela containing a cup, a bowl of sugar cubes, a pitcher of heavy cream, and a small teapot, its spout steaming in the cool February air.

“ _Danke,_ ” Angela murmured to her.

As the waitress left, McCree slanted a questioning look at first Angela, and then at the mug that sat before him.

“Coffee and steamed milk,” she answered the unvoiced question, having regained some of her temper with her visualization as they had waited. She began piling sugar cubes into her empty teacup, forming a respectable pyramid of them in its flat bottom. “Heavy on the milk.”

“Well now,” he responded in a pleased tone. He lifted the mug, giving it a deep sniff and a cautious sip. “That’s good,” he said, lowering the mug to watch her pour cream into her cup, slightly more than half filling it and completely submerging the pyramid of sugar cubes. “You remembered.”

“You made it very difficult to forget.” She shook her head at him, and picked up the small teapot, pouring the hot tea into her cup in a steady stream until it was full.

McCree’s hand moved to adjust the hat he was not wearing. He checked the gesture with a faint huff. “Yah, well, cream kills the taste o’ the coffee.” He gave her cup a look of restrained horror as she used the provided teaspoon to stir its contents. “An’ you,” he added, “still make me wonder why you even bother with puttin’ in the tea.”

“To melt the sugar, of course.” Deeming the tea sufficiently stirred, she removed the spoon, being careful to shake it off by tapping it sharply with a finger while she held it over the liquid rather than by clinking it against the delicate rim of the cup.

A disgusted “Eurgh,” was McCree’s only comment as she set down the spoon and lifted the cup to her lips.

Angela took a long sip, tasting almost nothing but the incredible sweetness of the drink with only the faintest hint of the tea and felt the satin smoothness of the heavy cream in her mouth, savouring it. She set the cup back down with care, cupping it with both hands.

“Why are you here, Jesse?” she asked, looking him directly in the face for the first time since they had sat down.

McCree grimaced slightly, and took a large swig of his coffee, obviously stalling. She glared. “Jesse,” she repeated.

“Well...” He set down his mug. “There’s somethin’ of a... reunion goin’ on,” he said finally, reaching up to finger his tie.

Her eyes locked on the motion, on the very specific, very familiar shade of blue. A shade of blue that had all but surrounded her for over a decade before it was ripped away, a blue that had been her life and the air she breathed.

“No.” Her lips formed the word soundlessly, though part of her wanted to scream it.

“An’ I came to extend ya the invitation to attend,” McCree continued as if she hadn’t reacted at all, “seein’ as unlike Genji or me, you weren’t sentimental enough to keep your communicator charged up.”

She froze in place, and McCree shifted in his seat, his eyes flicking quickly over her and then the various items on the table between them before returning to her face.

McCree. Reinhardt. Genji. Of course Genji, he would have known to take the same bet as McCree the moment the man sitting across from her had made it. And Genji would have had no choice but to have kept his communicator charged. It was an integral unit, part of his internal structure. It would have been far too much trouble to have it removed after the PETRAS Act had been passed. Not that the UN had been able to find the cyborg to enforce its removal after Overwatch was gone, in any case.

Sentimentality was as good an explanation as any for why McCree had kept his communicator working, she supposed, since she had always been suspicious of his abrupt resignation, and sentimentality was certainly the most plausible reason for Reinhardt to still have a working unit as well despite his forced retirement before Overwatch had been shut down.

Angela’s official communicator rested somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of the United States. Her unofficial one, with its far more discreet black casing, lay six feet deep in a grave, alongside her missed chances.

“Why?” she forced past her uncooperative, still-frozen lips, leaving the question of ‘who else? who was your bet with?’ unasked for the time being. “Why now? Why at all? Who would-”

“Well, most o’ that can be answered the same.” McCree leaned back in his seat. “Tho’ the majority comes down to certain old enemies.” His eyes flicked again, past each of her shoulders, and to either side of their table before he finished, his voice low “Namely, Talon.”

The final word of his sentence reignited a deep coil of rage within her, the deep, choking heat of it as familiar and as close as her own heartbeat.

“Talon?” she snarled at him, her voice harsh in her throat.

Those last six years before it all ended, Talon had been one of the two words she had seen most often in both mission dossiers and medical records, until it seemed as if she could close her eyes and see the word printed on the back of her eyelids in a cold, professional font.

Talon. The memories were sharp-edged, even after so long.

A long-limbed, elegantly beautiful woman with empty eyes sitting in an isolation room, her pale skin scattered with bruises and cuts, her rich French accent curling over the words _“so pretty, your smile,_ cherie _. ’ow do you do it? I ‘ave forgotten...”_ while outside in the corridor a man sobbed.

Autopsy reports scattered across a borrowed desk. Another mission gone bad because they were expected when they shouldn’t have been. And another. And another.

Ana Amari’s funeral. The lack of a body. Fareeha’s face, so much like her mother’s, the expression blank, frozen in stone as she threw Morrison’s hand off her shoulder and spit _“Not sorry enough to go back and find her,”_ at him before stalking away.

Jesse McCree himself, so many years younger, pale, bloodless, bandages and casts on every part of him except the arm that he didn’t have anymore screaming his way through fever-dreams from the infection that had set in before he could finally be hauled to medical care.

She had grown to hate the word Talon and all that it stood for. Enough that when she had started hearing it again with increasing frequency in the last handful of years the fires of her hatred had barely died down enough to count as being reignited.

Unsurprised and thus unconcerned at her sudden venom, McCree spread his hands. “Seems ‘Tena wasn’t as shut down as she was s’posed to be,” he said. “She and Winston have been holed up together in Gibraltar all this time.” He huffed slightly, and leaned forward to take another sip of his coffee. “A bit not so long ago, few months ago now, they got a nasty visit that nearly took them out, and the upshot’s that Winston called for the old gang to get back together again.”

“A... visit,” she rolled the two words around in her mouth, then took another long sip of her tea to erase the sour feeling of them with sweetness.

McCree’s metal fingers tapped the handle of his mug, which he hadn’t let go of, the sound only barely muffled by the leather of the glove he was wearing over it. She recognized the pattern of the Blackwatch cadences on the second repeat. “Well, ‘Tena says they were lookin’ for ‘personal records’,” his free hand vaguely waved the air quotes around the words, “but that they din’t get ‘em.”

‘ **danger, caution, danger, caution, danger, caution,** ’ his fingers tapped against the handle of his mug as he spoke.

Angela bit her lip. She drained her cup of tea, practically shooting the remaining liquid as if it was alcoholic, and set about concocting another.

“I want nothing to do with this,” she said, pouring the cream to submerge the pile of sugar cubes in the bottom of the teacup with a hand that was almost steady. “And I have no clue why you would wish to involve yourself in this fool’s venture,” she added, setting the cream pitcher back onto the tea tray with a sharp click.

McCree stayed quiet as he watched her pour tea into her cup, his face in what she remembered to be his neutral resting expression — a slight, almost-smile that lifted a little higher on one side of his mouth than the other. Somewhere in his mind cogs and wheels were turning vigorously enough to give him that expression, the closest she had ever seen to a real blank face on him while he was conscious.

“If you’re deciding how to lie to me, Jesse, you might as well get up and leave now,” she said, pointing her teaspoon at him.

McCree’s brows drew together into a faint frown, and he leaned back in his seat again as she started to stir her tea, bringing up his foot to rest his ankle on the other knee.  
“Don’ wanna lie to you, Angie.”

Which didn’t mean that he wouldn’t. She swallowed a sigh as she tapped a few drops of tea off her spoon. It only meant that he didn’t want to, exactly as he had said.

As she set down her spoon on the tea tray again, he fixed a serious gaze on her. “Don’ wanna be goin’ back without you, neither.” His propped-up foot jiggled. “We’re in dire state.” His voice dropped in volume, keeping his next words strictly for their table, but gained significantly in intensity. “We’ve got no medical, ‘cept for a streetfighter kid with no trainin’ that stops bleedin’ with music, an’ an omnic that can make a body temp’rarily forget they’re hurtin’. Nothin’ that can come close to match a proper doc. A good doc.”

Angela paused for long moments before she spoke. It was not like the Jesse McCree that she remembered to show the hook in his bait so openly. Even though ten years was not a short length of time, she would have expected the life that he had been leading since his abrupt departure from Blackwatch a few months before the explosion at the Swiss headquarters would have made him more subtle, not less.

“I do not doubt that is a reason you want me to come to this ‘reunion’ as you call it,” she said finally, choosing her words with care. “It is not, however, a reason why you would have involved yourself in it.” She looked away from McCree to stare down into her teacup, as yet untouched since she had refilled it. “To gather all those who are being hunted conveniently into a single place as Winston is doing...” she sighed. “It is entirely less than an ideal course of action.”

“Bein’ scattered apparently ain’t all that ideal, either.” McCree’s jiggling foot stopped as he reached for his coffee mug, turning it around in his fingers rather than lifting it for a drink.

She furrowed her brows at him in an unspoken question.

He stopped playing with his mug, his propped-up foot resuming its steady tick of movement. “Had a run-in with a Talon strike team on a train, a few years back,” he said quietly. “Had a good look at their tactics, the way they move their people. An’ I tell you, it was powerful familiar, if you get my meanin’.” He shifted, the tick of his foot speeding up, then slowing back to the previous rhythm. “Got me to thinkin’ ‘bout just how many o’ the folk on my side a’ things back then hit the road before that dumbfuck Act even came up for signin’, so there wasn’t a one of them in all those arrest photos that got splashed around. An’ once I got thinkin’ ‘bout that, I started to wonder where they mighta washed up. What they might be doin’.”

Angela took a sip of her tea before asking the question he wanted her to ask him. “And what did you find?”

McCree dropped his crossed-over foot back to the ground, and spread his hands. “A man on th’ run from the law an’ the lawless both don’t have too many resources,” he drawled thickly, “but e’en so, it’s a mite suspicious that pretty much all o’ the ‘old friends’ I could actually find were dead.”

He held her gaze as he continued speaking. “So, I thought I’d take a look at what I could o’ th’ more lit up side o’ the old matters, an’ I find much the same state o’ affairs, ‘cept with a handful of notable exceptions.”

“Two is a coincidence, three is suspicious, and four is a pattern,” she quoted softly.

“I could show you a sight more’n four,” McCree responded darkly. “Got so that when the call invitin’ me to the reunion came in, I took the chance that it would mean I could keep who was left o’ my own in the sight of my two eyes.”

Angela didn’t need to ask if she counted as one of McCree’s own. If she hadn’t, she knew, he would never have come to Switzerland himself, would never have said anything when the matter of Mercy’s possible whereabouts had come up with the team, would have sat by and simply let Reinhardt wait by Jack Morrison’s deceptively simple grave in Arlington Cemetery year after year until his hope of seeing her there faded and died.

Considering that it was Reinhardt, it would have been a great many years to remain silent, but she didn’t doubt that McCree would have waited him out all the same.

It was troubling, though, to learn that former agents of both Blackwatch and Overwatch were apparently being hunted. Worse was that they were being hunted successfully, and the possibility that it was by their former comrades if McCree’s suspicions about how Talon was operating and the source of some of its personnel were true.

“I don’t like this, Jesse,” she sighed. “It doesn’t make sense. They hunted us in the past, certainly, but that was when we were a threat to them. Why would they continue to do so when we are no longer able to interfere with... with what they do?”

“Now that I don’t rightly know.” McCree shook his head. “An’ to be truthful, I din’t even suspect ‘em of bein’ the ones doin’ it ‘till I heard ‘bout them goin’ after ‘Tena’s files. So I’m still workin’ it all out.” He reached for his coffee and took a swig, then grimaced at the taste of the cold mouthful. “Got distracted.”

Angela tipped her head slightly to the side. “Distracted?” she asked, knowing he wanted her to, and took a sip of her own drink. Though her tea had gone as cold as McCree’s coffee had, she still only really tasted the sweetness and the sheer volume of heavy cream in it smoothed out the odd, fuzzy edge that black tea developed when it went cold, in a way that mere steamed milk couldn’t help cold coffee.

McCree flashed her a familiar half-feral smile, and she realized that what he was about to say was the belated bait on the hook he had so openly shown her before.

“Genji shared some intel he turned up with me,” he said, “which indicates, with good reliability, that today’s anniversary and much o’ the mess leading up to it was entirely due to Talon gettin’ their fingers, toes, and various other appendages wound into us. All through us, and under both o’ the Commanders, until they couldn’t work past ‘em anymore ‘cause they got too suspicious and then they took ‘em out, same as they did Lacroix and the Captain.”

Angela’s breath stopped in her lungs, and a red haze descended over her mind as McCree’s words sank in. She had already hurled the lifted teacup in her hand at him before she realized what she was doing.

McCree dodged to the side, his hand flying up to his head to clamp down the hat that he wasn’t wearing. The cup just barely clipped his shoulder and spun off up and to the side, spraying sugary tea and cream in a wide arc before it crashed to the pavement of the patio and shattered.

“Whoa there!” he yelped, and yanked the tea tray and its variety of other possible projectiles away from her before she could grab a fresh weapon of opportunity. “Breathe, Angie!”

The red haze began to clear slightly when the teapot was pulled away from her grasping fingers just before they could close on it, and she sucked in a great, heaving breath at his reminder to do so. The chill of the air hitting her lungs so abruptly sped up the clearing of her mind so that when their waitress reappeared, wide-eyed and worried looking, Angela was merely flushed and short of breath rather than frantically grasping for a fresh weapon to hurl in order to vent her sudden blinding need to destroy something.

“Sorry to concern you, Miss,” McCree soothed the waitress, his vowels different, his voice gone somewhat nasal. Still an American accent to be sure, but one from an entirely different region than his usual drawl. “I was being an asshole. Could you take all these,” he waved at the tea tray and his own partially drained cup of coffee, “away, and bring us some napkins and the bill? I’ll pay for the broken cup.”

The waitress nodded jerkily, and moved to clear the table, skirting skittishly around the both of them. As she picked up the tea tray with one hand, the other dug into her uniform’s apron pocket, and produced some paper napkins. She dropped them on the table, picked up McCree’s partially empty coffee cup, set it on the tea tray, and hurried back inside the building with them.

McCree snapped up a couple of the napkins and set about attempting to mop up the sticky liquid that had sprayed over his suit jacket shoulder and upper arm with them.

“Are you... okay, Angie?” he asked carefully. His accent was still the wrong one, and she hated the sound of it coming out of his mouth. “You’ve been running pretty hot for most of our conversation today.” His eyes were concerned as he looked at her instead of where his hand blotted at the wet patches of cream and tea on his arm.

It took a moment for Angela to remember the idiom he had used. When she did recall its meaning, she sighed, her shoulders slumping a little.

“I... My anger runs very close to the surface when I come here,” she admitted. “There are too many bad memories in this place.”

Acrid smoke catching in her lungs and at the back of her throat. Sliding on rubble, cursing Torbjörn for designing the Valkyrie suit with heels and swearing to herself that the Mk Five model would have flat boots or she would refuse to field-test it. The dozens of people’s remains found in the basement levels when they were excavated days, weeks later, most of which were so destroyed they could only be identified through their DNA. Circling the memorial stones again and again, reading every name.

The agony of not knowing who had torn their lives apart. Of knowing just how much of a lie the official story was but being utterly unable to refute it.

The waitress returned, snapping the bill down on the table with practised precision, setting it down in a spot perfectly equidistant between Angela and McCree. An interesting skill. Angela wondered just how many people with difficult to interpret relationships with each other came to this particular café to have tense conversations with each other.

McCree reached for the bill as it hit the table. “I’ve got this one,” he said, still in the American accent that was nothing like his, pulling a wallet — worn, but not too beat up, she noticed — out from somewhere like a magician’s trick and turning the full force of a charming smile on the waitress.

The passage of over a decade of time had done nothing to reduce the effectiveness of that particular expression on McCree’s face. The waitress went faintly pink across the cheeks as it took effect.

Angela remained silent as McCree ran his thumb across brightly-coloured Swiss francs and charmed the waitress into remembering the handsome American man who blatantly flirted with her far better than his quiet, angry companion. She used the time to think, since her anger had managed to settle enough for her to do so clearly. Or, at least, clearly enough.

Talon had already been her enemy before that day. They had been her enemy for a very long time. And they had remained her enemy, even before McCree’s revelations: many of the crisis zones she had worked in over the past several years had been traceable to their work, or at least their meddling, nor had she missed the occasional unmistakable logo on the shoulder or breast of a person standing next to a warlord as they ordered foreign aid workers out of their territory on pain of death, or on the equipment of the sort of scum who raided refugee camps for medicine and food — and occasionally people — to sell on the black market.

So learning that they were the ones responsible for destroying Overwatch — her life, her livelihood, her next best thing to having a family again, her home — did not so much change her attitude toward Talon as it honed what she had already felt toward the organization into hard-edged, furious clarity.

Nine years. Nine years of not knowing who to blame, of twisting, sour anger, of a direction-less, burning need for retribution. Given her initial reluctance to have anything to do with them, having mistaken the organization for nothing more than another warmongering army, it was almost ridiculous how deeply and thoroughly Overwatch and Blackwatch had anchored within her very being. So deeply that even after so many years had passed since the organization’s unnatural death that it still felt like a part of her.

Angela knew that there was something missing inside her, had known it when her parents had died and she had felt no grief, only a consuming rage toward their killers. Had reaffirmed it nearly twenty years after that when she had awakened on her laboratory floor, anger burning in her veins, her cheek pressed against cold tile, her body surrounded by broken glass, years worth of work ruined. Accepted it daily with the weight of unanswered questions around her neck tempering the steel of her resolve into something unbreakable.

There was a flaming sword of anger within her where any form of sadness should have been. And a sword was meant to kill with. It was it’s only purpose.

Talon’s hand had held the knife that had been plunged into the heart of Overwatch. Angela stared down at her hands as they rested on the table.

Thoroughly charmed and looking pleasantly flustered, the waitress left their table to return inside the building, tucking a bundle of McCree’s Swiss francs in her apron pocket as she went. As she vanished back inside the restaurant, McCree stood, his hand going up in an aborted attempt to adjust the hat that was still not on his head as he did. He sighed, and came around the table to Angela’s side.

This time McCree offered Angela his elbow as she stood up before she could start to reach for it, the very picture of gentlemanly charm. She took it silently, making sure — as before — that she wasn’t holding it in a way that could cause fabric to get jammed in the elbow joint of his mechanical arm, and let him lead her away, down the street.

Angela let McCree guide them through the streets, their pace deliberate but unhurried — looking as if they had somewhere that they were going even though she suspected that he had no real destination in mind. She stayed quiet as they walked together, and knew that she had waited long enough when he spoke.

“I don’t aim to force you to anything, Angie. Y’should know that.” His flesh hand came up to pat hers where it rested against his metal forearm. It lingered there as he turned to look down into her face, and she was thankful that he was once again speaking in his own voice.

She squeezed his arm, knowing that even though the metal of his prosthetic limb couldn’t feel it the hand resting over hers could, and met his gaze until he looked away again, saying nothing. She caught a whiff of smoke as he dropped his hand away from hers with a faint sigh, something richer and thicker than the smell of the cigarettes he used to favour. Something she had missed noticing when they had walked together before thanks to her angry fuming at the time. He had most likely been smoking as he had waited for her to arrive at the memorial.

The trick to drawing things out of Jesse McCree — so long as he considered you his ally — was simply to remain quiet for long enough. He never could let a silence go on for long if he had something to say without succumbing to a need to impart it.

If McCree didn’t still consider her an ally, he wouldn’t have come, wouldn’t have already shared the information that he had. Wouldn’t have pointed his finger at the organization that had destroyed both their lives and their futures. The walk from the memorial to the café simply hadn’t been long enough. So Angela waited, silent.

“Iffn’ you want it, I’ll go,” McCree said at last, quietly, his chin tucked in close to his chest. “And iffn’ you tell me so, you were never here neither, nor will you ever be. You jus’ say the word.” His expression was resigned.

Nearly seven years she had hidden in plain sight, travelling from war-zones to refugee camps to crisis zones and back again, endlessly moving, endlessly helping, but never as Doctor Ziegler. Seven years since she had belatedly realized that the apparently unending hearings being done by the UN were less about ferreting out wrongdoing and blame within Overwatch and more about portioning and claiming its assets — herself included. Eight years since she had realized that she no longer knew what her purpose was. Nine since her future burned. Thirteen — nearly fourteen — since Talon had, unknowingly, first marked itself to her as her enemy.

Angela lifted her free hand to her chest, pressing through her shirt to feel the shape of the ruined dog-tags against the skin between her breasts. Her new path was clear to her at last.

“Oh, Jesse,” she sighed fondly, turning her face to smile up at him, “if you try to leave without me I will strangle you myself.”

McCree’s stride hitched, an unplanned pause in the middle of a step before he barked with laughter, the sound bouncing through the street around them.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is actually the second Overwatch story that I ever wrote. It's been through a lot of edits and re-writes since then, more than I maybe care to admit, but it is here that I first started exploring the kernel of the idea that became the Back to the Fold AU. How far that idea has come since then.


End file.
